In Service

One of the districts that I’ve been working with for less than a year has built a variety of grade-level common formative assessments that they plan to begin using this fall. Getting to this point has been a long, winding road. Uphill. Both ways. In the dark. Through several feet of snow. Without proper footwear. And in the end, this has been exciting work to find myself involved in, even in an ancillary way, because unlike some of the more “common” common formative assessments I’ve seen and used, these pieces are engaging, creative, and infused with tasks that demand higher level thought. I’ve got a feeling that teachers will truly value these tasks even more once they’ve got data back from them, and it will be interesting to see what they learn from their implementation. They will begin using Ainsworth’s collaborative scoring process this year as well, and I know that the leaders of this project are eager to meet with him when he presents as a General Studies speaker at Erie 1 this fall. Witnessing this work as it has unfolded is really rewarding.

I remember my first years in the classroom…..swimming in standards and text books and lesson plans and IEPs and assessments and test data and all of it. I remember feeling pulled in a bazillion different directions. It was incredibly overwhelming most of the time, and I longed for a target and some sort of way to measure whether or not I was hitting it. I hope that as teachers start making use of tools like formative assessments, they will feel a greater sense of mastery over all that they are confronted with.

With the inclusion of formative assessment building and processes like collaborative scoring, it seems like there is a possibility that something that often ran the risk of pitting teachers against each other–assessment–now shows tremendous promise as a tool for bringing them together to find solutions that will help kids and discover what sense can be made from it all. It makes me want to head back into the classroom myself, sometimes.

It’s a whole new world out there.